I've seen talented artists one after another leave the s&box community in frustration with the tools and projects consistently breaking and I think the effects of this are really starting to show. Early s&box brought so many beautiful maps, and these days they're few and far between.

I believe that a large part of this is tools breaking. the scene mesh editor is rarely worked on, hammer breaks frequently with the excuse for slow fixes being that it's hard to work with and soon to be replaced anyways. Every time hammer or modeldoc breaks in another frustrating way all development of anything cool stops. It's incredibly demotivating to work on a project you're excited about, only to be put on hold while you beg people you barely know to fix it.

And yes, I know that all these things are for good reason, but surely facepunch can find ways around these problems? The multi million dollar company can hire more developers, work closer with the community, something can be done I'm sure. 

Garry has proven to me he isn't incompetent, I love this engine and in some ways I love this community. If you are reading this, Garry, you can't expect feedback from the community without engaging with them. It's your responsibility to make sure no one feels like they're left out, because those people won't give you feedback and s&box will have major gaps in its design.

I do also agree with the sentiment that maybe more people should be hired and be brought on board (especially some sort of community engagement person) but it's obvious that the currently hired people are all also very skilled people in their own regard and good at what they do. In my experience I've had some pretty good interactions, specifically with Laylad and he's been more than accommodating.

I do agree that the engine needs to move in all regards when it comes to it's development so that all people have 'fancy new toys' to play around with. I think maybe the scope of the project might be too big for the amount of people on the team at the moment, maybe not. Infact, sometimes when I see what people work on it feels like they're being stretched way too thin. Ofcourse like I said earlier though, we are just bystanders and we don't have the complete picture about what goes on behind the scenes.

I do however think that at the end of the day that Garry and the team do have decades of experience in the industry and probably have a more concrete plan behind the scenes, if they didn't I'd like to think that Garry wouldn't be pouring the amount of money into it like he is already, it's a huge opportunity handed down to Facepunch by Valve firstly and I don't think they'd want to screw it up.

Part of what repels talent from s&box is the standoffish, disrespectful culture of the s&box community. If you suggest a feature the developers don't like, you'll get called stupid and wrong. If you say that a Discord server with 50,000 members should have more than two moderators and an eight word rules list, you'll hear denial that there is any problem at all.

Garry is the "cool boss" who never grew up. His employees and community are harmed by it. Having no rules isn't cool - it's negligent. At least it's not General Disruption, but if that's your bar, you should log off forever.

I shouldn't have to loudly and publicly litigate whether every instance of bigotry I see is actually bigotry, just to make the mods take action. This community isn't safe. Why should artists suffer a community that hates them?

I believe Facepunch is pushing for scene mesh and light baking right now and has been for a month, so I believe it's not too long before scene mesh is on par with hammer.

I remember saying the exact same thing a year ago, since then they've hired Sol, Lolleko, and Antopilo, three great engine and editor programmers that have already pushed great tools and updates.
There's also a permanent slot in https://facepunch.com/careers for s&box engine programmer, so I assume they're currently looking as well.

s&box is in the best spot it's ever been, rather than artists leaving I'd say there aren't any entering but I'd say that's not on the tools.

I'd like to add a few thoughts to this thread...

It seems to me that the engine doesn't need Hammer, work is already underway to replace it, and that's the right decision. In the future, we will have a full-fledged tool for creating meshes directly in the scene, as well as the ability to bake lighting. In addition, it will soon be possible to properly edit the terrain and vegetation on it. After these innovations, map developers will be satisfied with the engine's functionality.

What I personally would like is a simplification of working with .fbx models and animations. I lack the ability to directly play animations through a file. ModelDoc and AnimGraph seem inconvenient to me.

And I would also really like to have the ability to change the measurement system to meters. Many of my acquaintances refused to switch from Unity solely because of this. :(

Just make games guys

Its never as simple as "just hire more people", that never works, 1 right person is worth more then 30 wrong people who it's just a job for. Which is 99.9% of applicants.

We're working on what the priority is for us, and we're clearing it faster then other companies with 100s of people would.

Hammer works fine, scene mesh is being actively worked on. If stuff actually breaks we fix it within a day or two, is there something that isn't?

@matt Hammer works fine, 

Static overlay lighting is broken and skybox is showing in 2d views making them unusable 

I'm noticing s&box being more than a job often leads to any and all criticism being taken personally. I praise s&box to everyone I know all the time, it's my favorite engine, I would rather quit game development than use something else because everything else sucks. But that doesn't mean I don't have criticisms.

Way too often yall explain away any issues people have. it doesn't matter why the issue is happening, it's still an issue.

You'd struggle to offend me and I'm the first to say what stuff of ours is shit. We want the criticisms, we want the issues, but there is a constant confusion about priorities.

Hiring a boat load more of people isn't going to clear this any faster.

I’d rather choose quality over quantity. Doing more just for the sake of it often makes things less effective .The engine isn’t fully finished yet and won’t be for a long time; it’s a project that’ll evolve over many years.

From my perspective, Discord is just a communication tool  useful, but not essential. It would be cool if the s&box website had more community features though, like a friends list or text-based channels similar to Discord.

And finally, I think it’s important to appreciate how often Facepunch employees are pushing fixes and adding new things. We as developers aren’t working alone — the other side is too. We should be grateful for their expertise and effort.

If only S&box hadn’t switched to the scene system.
People just want to create mods for a fun, well-established game — not build an entire game from scratch. The time and technical skills required for those two things are worlds apart. The best direction would be to follow the CS2 community and the upcoming HLX community. Now that S&box has separated itself from Valve’s ecosystem, its appeal has dropped significantly.

Maybe to you, that move opened a lot of paths for many people and developers.

I think it’s important to remember what phase S&box is actually in right now. We’re in an active development preview, where everything from file formats to editor tools is still being shaped.

We’re all here learning what breaks, what workflows are painful, and what the community actually needs before things get locked in. It’s messy, and that’s the point. We signed up early to give feedback, not sit on a finished product.

Facepunch has been extremely transparent for a studio of their size. They push tools early, respond directly to feedback, and let us mess with things before they’re finished. It’s rare to have this much access and to actually see feedback turn into updates.

The best thing we can do right now is keep experimenting and filing issues on Github. That’s the source of truth for problems. Talking about bugs in Discord doesn’t guarantee a fix, but a GitHub issue actually gets tracked. The discomfort we are all feeling is just part of the growing pains that comes with building something this complex and we’re both here dealing with it as employees and community.

On the “hire more people” thing. It’s like CPU worker threads. If you spawn too many threads they start fighting for the same resources. The overhead slows everything down. Same deal here: throwing more people at an unfinished system just creates bottlenecks because everyone is waiting on core architecture that is still being finished.

As for the Garry part, I don’t really get that. Garry is the CEO, he represents Facepunch, and Facepunch IS engaging with the community every day. They give us tools while they’re still being built, pushing experimental updates, and responding to feedback in real time. That level of engagement is obscene.

Eventually, I’m sure we’ll hit a “community polish” phase but right now the foundation changes frequently and it makes more since for them to focus on iteration instead of explaining every breakage in real time, especially when asking for community feedback means managing hundreds of conflicting opinions almost instantly.

These things take time. Building a game engine is such an abhorrently complex task these days that the progress made here makes me happy.

That 1 person was Braxen and you passed him up 🥀

I've listed my thoughts in Discord but I'll throw them in here for the record and discussion.

Artists who have been around regularly have left - that is the natural progression of things, but they're not being replaced by new ones - and that's the core of the issue.

One thing I think has next to nothing to do with it is Hammer/Scene Mesh. If you're an 'artist' - you have made art before, which means you have some kind of art pipeline in place. Having Hammer broken, or Scene Mesh being somewhat unsatisfactory or subpar should have no impact on an artist with an established pipeline. Most other game engines have such incredibly basic level blocking tools as it is that scene mesh already meets that need which the artist likely never had a need for in the first place.

tl;dr - Artists don't use or need Hammer/Scene Mesh unless they're coming from Source adjacent platforms (which is likely already a fully captured demographic). Artists coming from Unreal, Unity, Godot, or whatever other objectively worse engine (hehe) do not care for Hammer or Scene Mesh.

One thing I believe that plays a big factor in attracting artists to the platform is seeing what can be done with said platform. The closest thing to an art showcase on public platforms (X I believe is basically the only platform that s&box is on?) is the thumbnail of news posts. Rick has a number of Artstation posts of s&box weapons that have not been posted (technically they're Marmoset renders but they're s&box weapons - they catch people's eyes). Jason occasionally includes a render or two in some of his commits. Louie/bakscratch has a number of screenshots that get posted around the server and included in news posts - but they don't get showcased individually on public channels. Artists who don't use the engine aren't interested on reading through patch notes for an engine they don't use. Show them what people are making in the engine, and they will get excited and will want to use the engine for their art. That's how I think the influx of new artists begins.

Secondly, and probably most importantly - is the lack of artist tools. You can bring people to the engine through showcases, but you need to retain them with the tools - and s&box's tools for artists is lacking compared to just about every other engine out there.

There's more I'm missing, but at the moment those are my major pain points as an artist - and I wouldn't want to push to get more artists flowing in until the basic tools are in place for them.

Outside of random crashes here or there, ModelDoc isn't that bad - and is the only real learning curve for artists coming to s&box from other engines. Hammer and Scene mesh only really effects environment artists, and even environment artists are used to doing most of their work in a DCC.